


a bloody right hand and the highest of hopes

by vandalwithoutacause



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:27:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28622520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vandalwithoutacause/pseuds/vandalwithoutacause
Summary: Harrow's robes were important to her. She wouldn't give them to just anyone.
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 8
Kudos: 40





	a bloody right hand and the highest of hopes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liveonthesun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liveonthesun/gifts).



> Happy yuletide to you, Liveonthesun! You asked for Harrow reflecting on the importance of her clothing, but I've just moved to the PNW so you also got a lot of her complaining about different kinds of cold.
> 
> The title is from [this song](https://open.spotify.com/track/5EnbxJsYyYwQhEIVEVPbNO?si=sxGRu4QcT6aIS0kxnF3sDQ).

It was never warm in Drearburh.

Morning on the Ninth was always frigid, and usually found it’s dreadful mistress Harrowhark Nonagesimus stalking her ancestral halls with her head down and her sharp eyes always looking up and her impenetrably black robes surging behind her like the foul waves that she hadn’t yet watched crest against the cliffs of the place that would one day break her, cleanly, into two pieces.

On those mornings Harrow could feel the air sucking at the breath as it left her lungs, hungry and indifferent to her discomfort. But it couldn’t bite at her skin, because there was no skin bare to it. 

One of Harrow’s earliest memories was of the Lady Pelleamena Novenarius, her mother, pulling small gloves over her small hands, and stuffing her small feet into boots that wouldn’t have fit without the thick black stockings that insulated her against them. She was just barely old enough to apply her face paint herself, perhaps five or six years of age, and between her hood and her childish death’s head mask, the moments prior to this memory were likely the Ninth’s last opportunity to nip at her bare cheeks.

The thick, heavy robes were a necessity in Drearburh. Harrow slept in them, most nights, and her stockings too, effectively robbing the Ninth of any chance at her clothed feet in the morning. When she was very little she made a game of it, her adversarial relationship with her home. In time it became a matter of survival, and the Ninth’s Holy Family made it clear that the Reverend Daughter would not be permitted games.

On the morning she was to depart the Ninth, almost certainly forever, Harrow awoke in a cold sweat. She was surrounded on all sides by deepest, heaviest black. Gasping, she threw herself out of bed, out of the dark, and fell onto the cold floor of her bedroom. Only her robes saved her knees from the freezing stone, her hands from the rough ground. When she pulled them tight around her shoulders, tighter around her hips, Harrow's robes felt like the only thing shielding her away from hungry, frigid death.

The vestments of the Ninth protected Harrow from the cold, they protected her from her parents, and from anyone who might have once been a friend. On this day they would have to protect her from Harrow herself.

\---

It’s never warm in Canaan House, either, although it’s a different kind of cold here -- wet to the Ninth’s bone dry; cold in a clammy, clinging way so disturbingly distinct from Drearburh’s desiccating chill. 

It certainly hasn’t been warm in the sixteen minutes since Cythera the First fell to the ground, grinning and lifeless, amidst the mangled pieces of herself and her construct. In the quiet after the Lyctor’s delinquent death Harrow tries, desperately, to stop counting the seconds. Her traitor’s heart thuds rebelliously against the cage of her sternum.

There’s blood everywhere, or something very similar to blood but black and dead and already congealed. Harrow is flat out on her back on the ground now, swaddled in her black robes and tucked up against a different body, with differently colored blood.

It’s cold -- _of course it’s cold_. Harrow chokes on her first real inhale in her newly strengthened body, and dimly considers that soon she must thank the Emperor Undying that she can still feel uncomfortable. Her fingers are stiff where they lay curled in her crusty and torn gloves, against the unmoving chest of --

For a long while Harrow just chokes, or breathes, or drowns in the cold and the wet of Canaan House.

In the back of her mind, in a place she’s already begun to seal off, Harrow knows that she’s running out of time. There are pinpricks of light, distant in the darkening sky but growing in size even as she’s laid there, wasting what few minutes she has to do what must yet be done. She doesn’t need to pick them out -- Camilla has done that for her.

Gently, distantly, Camilla says, “Nonagesimus, I’m sorry, there isn’t time,” and Harrow can feel the truth of her words breaking over her mind like a sunrise. She sits up at once, and she wipes at her eyes, and her bare fingers come away covered in wet black.

Harrow brings her shaking, naked, dirty fingers up to the bone clasp at her throat, which holds her outer robes closed around her body. She thumbs it open with a quiet sob, and pulls the robes around to pool in her arms. They look huge in her arms, or her arms look small. Harrow gives them a weak shake, as if she could ever hope to clean them, and a cloud of bone dust rises up around her.

For a while she sits there in the dirt, choking again, and Camilla says nothing, does nothing. Some time passes -- her heart has mercifully stopped keeping count. Eventually she stops coughing, and starts laughing, and wonders if her sanity is just now leaving her or if it’s already gone.

She flings the fabric out to billow in the cold damp air. She settles it over the still-bleeding body at her side. Slowly and with her eyes carefully averted, as if she were approaching a startled predator animal, Harrow tucks the once-black fabric tight around someone else's shoulders, someone else's hips. The body does not move -- she didn’t expect it to, really -- and Harrow has already begun to whisper out a prayer that her heart knows better than her mind.

With the last shreds of her shattered will, Harrowhark the First prays to the Rock and the Tomb and the Body -- _the other body_ \-- that the vestments of the Ninth may yet remain a shield against the black of death itself.

And then she stands up, more exposed to the world than she’s been since the siphoning trial. She sniffs, huffs out the thick damp of Canaan House. When she looks to Camilla, it is from the back of her mind, the only part left lucid as she builds a wall around all of this.

“Alright, Sixth. What do we do now?”

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow me on Tumblr at [Sappy Butch Romance Writer](https://sappybutchromancewriter.tumblr.com/) if you want.


End file.
